Interdisciplinary, International Exploration to Strengthen Creativity, Giftedness and Leadership

Creativity, giftedness, and leadership are complex, important phenomena, especially in the threatening turbulence of 21st-century conditions; consequently, there is an increasing need to understand how to strengthen them. We can learn much about these phenomena from within the borders of specialized disciplines; however, they are too complex and multifaceted to fit within the walls of disciplinary silos. Interdisciplinary explorations can reveal theories and research findings that expand our knowledge bases about creativity, giftedness, and leadership. This analysis includes the rationale for engaging in interdisciplinary investigations for these purposes. It includes examples of the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking invigorates creativity and cognitive diversity; illuminates the benefits of visual–spatial gifts that strengthen the development of important talents in gifted students who can go on to become creative leaders; and shows how human rights can be strengthened by constraining economic and political corruption. It also describes the benefits of using interdisciplinary navigation through different levels of analysis, each of which includes a number of academic disciplines.

EXPLORATION ON THE TEACHING INNOVATION OF INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING OF APPRECIATION OF PIANO ART

Appreciation of piano art, as a public elective and general educational course for all undergraduates in comprehensive universities, aims to enhance all-round appreciation level for students, help them build confidence and team spirit, and keep the forever passion for music, art and life as well. In my teaching for students who come from different colleges with different majors, I hope that I can interpret piano, human and passion through the knowledge and the way of thinking which they got from their professional learning. Moreover, I hope this course is able to provide them with some inspiration. This article is going to explore the reform on interdisciplinary thinking during the teaching of Appreciation of piano art, in terms of piano and architecture, piano and machinery, and piano and language.

Critical Entitlement Theory on post-missionary paternalism in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe

The dynamic of power troubles are the doing and thinking and that knowledge is always contingent, standing above the abyss, as stated by Prof. J. Jansen in 2009. The issue of entitlement affected the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) at the onset of the third millennium. Leadership vacuum at the departure of missionaries led individuals to assume identities and hierarchies believed to have been interwoven into the polity and governing ideology of the COCZ. This connoted towards power, privilege and position for someone to benefit on church investments. The article suggests use of the critical Entitlement Theory (CET) to assess how contemporary situations at mission stations affect local churches and communities. Black elites who took over have created tensions and contradictions in churches by hiring persons who do not question their actions and words and persons who do not have an appreciation of the production and implementation of the church’s governing laws. Critical Entitlement Theory assumes that ‘the privileged ownership and administration theses’ that date back to white privilege in the colonial church created this problem. This ethnographic study discloses how a new interdisciplinary thinking on equity and justice to local Christians can rise to own and manage mission stations in their local congregations.

THE IMPACT OF INDUSTRY 4.0 ON EDUCATION CONTENTS

New jobs will be created because of the Industry 4.0 concept implementation needs, employers will require new, especially digital skills and abilities from their employees. There is a need to change teaching and educational techniques in all types of schools, and instead of being specialized narrowly in one area, education should focus on a much broader overview, as people need to be educated in systemic and interdisciplinary thinking at all types of schools, including nontechnical ones. The main goal of the study is to identify areas on which the content of education should focused on in the future in terms to Industry 4.0. As research methods, a questionnaire survey was conducted in Slovak companies during the period of February – June 2019 along with statistical methods. The survey was carried out by random selection, 350 companies were contacted with a return of 220 responses. The research outcomes declare that changes in workforce qualification structure related to the Industry 4.0 concept implementation should have a positive effect on increasing the competitiveness of companies and increasing production effectivity. Based on the results it is proposed the expected positive changes should be transformed into enforcing the vocational training in companies and structural changes within the Slovak educational system.

Navigating a defining moment: COVID-19 and curatorial thinking

The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered a critical moment in education. Questions of equity, engagement, and interaction have been brought into sharper focus as students’ homes became their classrooms. There is a demonstrated need for interdisciplinary thinking, enabling students to work with the resources they have at hand, and helping learners orient themselves in place and time. Defining Moments Canada/Moments Déterminant Canada, using the interdisciplinary framework of curatorial thinking, encourages students to make sense of information, more effectively create a meaningful story, and build a stronger sense of social responsibility and awareness. This framework is operationalized using the S.A.S.S. pedagogy—Selecting, Archiving, Sense-Making, and Sharing—through which students find their personal way into a research question and demonstrate their learning while considering narrative intent, evidence limitations, and their own role as a historical actor. This integrative, critical, and interdisciplinary focus is an approach to a (post)pandemic world that prioritizes creative student responsiveness to upcoming challenges.

New, regenerative approaches to sustainability : Redefining ecosystem functions, environmental management, and heritage conservation

The international conference “Sustainable Management of Cultural Landscapes in the context of the European Green Deal”, held in Santo Stefano di Camastra (Sicily, Italy) on November 9-14, 2021. aimed to shed light on those environmental, social, economic, and cultural problems of interactions between humankind and its natural environment, which cannot be answered through one single discipline but only by applying a multidisciplinary system approach, built on applied Earth System Science intimately interwoven with social sciences, economics and heritage science. The structure of the Congress mirrored this concept since the overlapping areas of sessions encouraged interdisciplinary thinking and practical approach to the key issues of regional development such as ecosystem protection, green infrastructures, sustainable and multifunctional agriculture, circular economy, renewable energy, regeneration, and conservation of natural environments and conservation of cultural heritage.

Wicked Problems in a Technological World

In this article, the morality in the “wickedness” of design problems as wicked problems is explored. I will use for that purpose the characteristics of wicked problems as identified by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. These characteristics suggest interdisciplinary thinking for solving such problems. An awareness of the wicked nature of design problems can stimulate proper use of the concept of utopias for solving these problems. I will use the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd to provide a framework for understanding the nature of design problems as wicked problems.

Lowering the walls: an integrative approach to first-year undergraduate business education

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of interdisciplinary thinking and the conditions and processes that foster it among first-year undergraduate students. Design/methodology/approach This study with 510 Australian students drawn from 2 cohorts explored an initiative to promote interdisciplinary teaching in an undergraduate ethics-based subject. The study focused on a case-study-based reflective essay intervention to compare the teaching and learning outcomes in the two student cohorts. Findings The results show how a case-study-based reflective essay intervention impacted on interdisciplinary learning. Introducing the case-study-based reflective essay improved interdisciplinary thinking. Findings show that integral to engaging students in interdisciplinary learning is a need for more experiential and active approaches built into education itself. Research limitations/implications The study findings extend Spelt et al.’s (2009) model in the business education context to link student learning outcomes to the learning processes, learning environment and interdisciplinary thinking. A key limitation of this study is that the intervention is limited to only two student cohorts. Practical implications The study recommends the use of reflective practice in interdisciplinary subjects to support a variety of learning outcomes across disciplines including classroom-based and assignment-based reflective practices which influence interdisciplinary thinking and active learning. Originality/value There is limited understanding on how business schools should or could attempt to promote interdisciplinary teaching and the actual methods for doing so. This study highlights the significance of integrating reflective practice in undergraduate business education to promote students’ interdisciplinary thinking.

Working Alternatives

Popular interest in the kinds of conditions that make work productive, growing media attention to the grinding cycle of poverty, and the widening sense that consumption must become sustainable and just, all contribute to an atmosphere thirsty for humanistic economic analysis. This volume offers such analysis from a novel and generative diversity of vantage points, including religious and secular histories, theological ethics, and business management. In particular, Working Alternatives brings modern Roman Catholic forms of engaging with economic questions—embodied in the evolving set of documents that make up the area of “Catholic social thought”—into conversation with one another and with non-Catholic experiments in economic thought and practice. Clustered not by discipline but by their emphasis on either 1) new ways of seeing economic practice 2) new ways of valuing human activity, or 3) implementation of new ways of working, the volume’s essays facilitate the necessarily interdisciplinary thinking demanded by the complexities of economic sustainability and justice. Collectively, the works gathered here assert and test a challenging and far-reaching hypothesis: economic theories, systems, and practices—ways of conceiving, organizing and enacting work, management, supply, production, exchange, remuneration, wealth, and consumption—rely on basic, often unexamined, presumptions about human personhood, relations, and flourishing.